In large, heterogeneous networks, a variety of different types of clients, hosts, and/or other nodes may be present. In terms of performing network management tasks on those diverse machines, each target in a managed network can have a different set of installed resources, including operating systems, and therefore require different types of management agents and installation procedures in order to link to desired network services. Those network services can include, for example, configuration management services, performance monitoring services, security services and others, all of which can typically he hosted and supported in remote management servers.
In conventional networks, an administrator may need to manually inspect or register target machines to assign the machines an appropriate or compatible management software component type, indicating what kind of local management agents are required to connect and register with remove management servers. While it may be possible and relatively convenient to identify the necessary management software component type at the time a target machine receives its original installation, in part because constituent operating system, application, and other details are know, it is difficult at downstream times to configure targets for proper management software component types, since their operating system type or version, as well as other configuration details, may change. It may be desirable to provide methods and systems for registering software management component types in a managed network, in which the types and/or classes of management software components required by or compatible with diverse machines can be automatically scanned, identified and stored to a database.